


Breaking Reflections

by guyi (yujael)



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mutants, F/M, Gen, they've got powers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2014-02-20
Packaged: 2017-12-16 21:49:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yujael/pseuds/guyi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything was fine and dandy once, but then the governments of the world decided that there had been one to many "accidents caused by mutated humanoids". Now they're being hunted, being killed or experimented on. If you respond green to testing, you have a power and regardless of what it is, you are dangerous.</p><p>They get used to running and hiding, struggling to live unseen, but when someone with the power of foresight escapes captivity with the help of a government researcher and finds the group led by Geoff Ramsey, things begin to change and there is no where left to hide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Powers

It’s usually Ray that they send out to get groceries and basic necessities. Geoff and Jack are kept busy making sure everyone’s in line, everyone’s safe. Michael’s too prone to anger and Gavin’s too prone to accidents. Ray is the least likely to reveal himself – his power isn’t as obvious as the others’, either – so they hardly have to look at each other and silently debate who’s going to go. Nobody wants to, because nobody wants to get caught, but Ray has the best luck.

Ray’s power is pretty obscure; they aren’t really sure what it is yet because it doesn’t show itself too often, but they know it’s there. He responded green to government testing, but how the hell he managed to escape is a story he’s never told. He still has a scar from the experience, though.

They keep making references to the Pixar movie and saying Jack is like Mr. Incredible – super strong and damn near invincible. Besides that, he also has the ability to refract light in strange ways; to bend it and hide himself in shadows. This is rare like Ray’s powers, but at least they’ve seen him do it a couple times when emotions run high enough. It’s usually when tension’s high that their powers show up more often.

Maybe it’s because he’s a parent, or maybe it’s just him, but when Geoff walks into a room, people feel “better”. Calmer, happier, whatever is opposite to any negative emotion they feel. It’s useful in arguments. Less useful is the fact that he can also blow things to smithereens. It has its uses, like creating distractions so that other mutants, other people like them, can get somewhere safely. (Usually these other people end up following Geoff back to their makeshift home anyway.)

It’s not a surprise to anyone that Michael’s powers show up when he’s angry. At first they thought they had faulty fuses, but then they realized that every flicker of lights and power outage, or any other weird electricity issue, coincides almost exactly with one of Michael’s rages. Anything electric goes haywire if he gets too mad. It’s not too bad if he’s in a crowded space, he can hide behind the normal people, but he’d have to get out of the area before things actually starts shattering.

Gavin is the one who’s cooped up the most, and they feel guilty about hardly letting him get out in public, but he understands that it’s because his power is the one that acts up most often (besides Geoff’s happy vibes and Jack’s iron skin). It doesn’t need high emotions to appear and Gavin has little to no control over it – basically any time he gets into an accident or knocks something over, things suddenly begin to move slower, sometimes to the point where it could take hours for an object to fall a few inches. It’d be too obvious if he tripped and fell on the sidewalk and the groceries, or even he himself, took too long to fall down.

Gavin and Michael go out the least, but they still do their part. Geoff and Jack might actually go out less than them nowadays – people just keep following Geoff back and their responsibilities grow along with their numbers. Soon they’ll have to move again; they hid in a warehouse at first, but it was too obvious and they barely managed to get out in time before government officials caught them. Then they met Ray and he led them to an old farm house away from the city. They stayed there for a while and moved again when Geoff came home one day with a fifth straggler, a little girl who could cancel the effect of gravity on an object.

(They could have just told the people to find their own safe haven, but after they met Ray and after they heard about what happened to those who’d been caught, it was a mutual agreement not to. They weren’t going to go out of their way looking for other mutants, but they weren’t going to leave any for dead, either.)

They moved from place to place if it looked like the government was on to them, or if the warehouse or home they were staying became too small. Some people left to go on their own way, and some stayed because they just didn’t have anywhere else to go. They tried to avoid large cities and stuck mostly to smaller cities and towns.

Things looked up when Geoff learned to forge the document that gave him ownership of a motel. He has to go around in public as a Mr. Jason Glasse, which doesn’t really fit him at all, but it gave them a place to stay longer than usual. (So far; almost six months, almost too long.) They keep a few rooms empty and clean in case someone else checks in, being extra careful to hide their powers when someone does, and try to live as normally as possible.

It’s surprisingly hard.

Jack keeps finding people sleeping on the ceiling above their beds because there is no gravity around them (although thankfully is hasn’t happened to any of the motel’s human tenants and it isn’t much of a problem so long as people still think it’s fun). They’ve stopped counting how many fuses have broken because Michael was upset. Gavin’s power acted up right in front of an unsuspecting tenant, but luckily the person was already drunk out of their mind. Geoff over reacted before he realized that and at the same moment the bottle he’d been carrying exploded.

Some people express the idea of heading north, but it’s difficult to know how the Canadians are handling the mutant population. Some of those people leave, and not to be morbid, but Michael wonders how close to Canada they get before getting caught. Geoff and Jack consider the idea, but they’ve never acted on it; Geoff is still extremely reluctant to leave Texas and the thought of returning to his family. They didn’t show signs of having a power and he left to protect them.

They all want to see the people they love, but they also know that they can’t be seen with or near those people. They can’t risk harming them just because they can’t control the abilities they were born with. They’re outlawed by the government and anyone who can’t escape is either killed or experimented. Usually killed, because most of their powers are considered dangerous.

They responded green and this time it didn’t mean go, it meant death.

But not for them, not if they could help it. 


	2. Not All On the Same Side

One of the market stalls has bundles of bananas on sale; one free if you buy two. Ray’s considering the offer, weighing it against another with grapes. ( _“People like grapes.”_ ) He glances up and across the street he sees two familiar figures arm in arm. One meets his eyes, the other waves at him and he waves back.

Michael and Gavin discovered a couple months back that it was easier if they went out in public together. Sure, there might be a higher chance of Michael getting angry, but Gavin’s a lot less likely to cause an accident if someone is actually leading him somewhere (by the hand, usually, because Gavin’s a sod and likes to wander off even when he knows he shouldn’t) and making sure he knows where he’s going. Then they noticed that the more it looks like they’re a couple, the more space other people give them. Gavin doesn’t fall or knock shit over and Michael has less reason to get mad; it’s a win-win.

Ray takes the bananas and catches up with them. Some of the people they walk by look like they’re trying to figure out if they’re all just friends or if they’re all lovers.

“Why didn’t you get the grapes?” Gavin asks, looking down at the bag of bananas like they’d failed their math test and he was disappointed in them. Not that he didn’t like bananas. People like bananas, Ray thinks. He’s not stupid enough to say that out loud, though.

“Better deal,” he says instead. “And there’s a lot more you can do with a banana than a grape.”

It gets a laugh out of Michael and Gavin looks like he’s trying to think of something to challenge that. Michael probably notices, too, because he elbows Gavin and tells him, “I swear to God if you make up some bullshit about grapes… Or fruit. Or food in general.”

“Don’t play with your food, Gavin.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Gavin defends himself. His face belies the statement entirely and he and Michael start elbowing each other back and forth.

“Watch out for pedestrians,” Ray tells them when Michael is jostled into him. The two are still arm in arm, using their proximity to each other to make quick jabs that keep getting harder. It doesn’t look like it, but they actually are “watching for pedestrians” – Gavin keeps glancing to his free side, making sure he doesn’t stumble too far away, and Michael actually has half a death grip on Gavin.

“Did you get sandwich fixings?” Michael asks when the fight stops. He heard one of the tenants at the motel say something about going out to get “sandwich fixings” and now it’s ingrained into his vocabulary. Like “gubbins” and other weird British words he got from Gavin.

“I got some bread and shit if that’s what you’re asking,” Ray lifts one of the bags in his hands. There’s a little less than he would usually get, but the prices on food recently went up. “What are you two walking around here for?”

They both shrug. “We got bored and I wanted doughnuts.”

“You had doughnuts without me?” Ray puts on an offended face. Michael plays along and they have a debate on why doughnuts are an important part of their relationship. It earns more stares and more space around them. Gavin just grins and steers them toward what was apparently his and Michael’s destination. It’s like a local Starbucks or something; it’s out of the way, but still relatively crowded.

“We’re getting doughnuts now,” Gavin pulls Michael to a random table. “Go get doughnuts, Ray.”

“Why me?”

“Because that guy at the counter,” Michael squints. “I don’t like the look in his eye.”

Ray looks over his shoulder; the guy behind the counter looks perfectly innocent, maybe a little exasperated. “I don’t see anything sinister about him.”

“Of course he’s sinister!” Michael exclaims, but Ray’s already put the bags down and gotten in line. Gavin’s still playing along, but now that they’re here, Ray really just wants doughnuts. He can tell that they’re really just trying to do whatever they can to brighten the day, anyway. They look like normal people, but don’t feel like it. They do whatever they can to make it feel less like they’re a bunch of mutants illegally wandering the streets.

But as it turns out - and Ray’s not really sure if Michael knew this or just chose a random person to poke fun at - something is actually up with the guy behind the counter. Nothing sinister, or malicious; Ray just wouldn’t be surprised if the cashier was hiding like they were. He orders a safe amount of doughnuts and the kid hardly looks away while he taps at the register. He’s obviously been doing this a while, the movements are almost like muscle memory, like the kid’s on auto pilot right now.

Then before he slides the paper bag over the counter, he looks like he’s having second thoughts, breaking with his pattern. He looks up at Ray and asks, “Do you want a box instead? To bring them back for the rest of your friends?”

Ray blinks a few times and then the kid seems to realize what his question was insinuating. He stammers and just shoves the bag at Ray, who takes it and goes back to the table without a word.

“Dude, okay, he’s not sinister,” he says quietly as he sits down, and Michael and Gavin suddenly get tense. “I think he’s like us,” Ray shrugs. “Don’t know what he can do, though.”

Michael leans to the side slightly to get another look at the cashier. “Man, I swear I didn’t even know. Like, I just picked out a random person.”

“Maybe he was just commenting on the amount of doughnuts you bought,” Gavin suggests. Ray shakes his head.

“Nah, man; I mean, it’s obvious I’m not the only one eating these doughnuts – although I wouldn’t say no to that – but that guy was like… I don’t know.”

“You just don’t know?” Michael repeats with a bit of sarcasm. “Like, do you have some kind of mu – sensing mojo?”

“Maybe that’s what it is,” Gavin leans forward. “Close your eyes, Ray. Can you feel me? Can you sense my – my aura?”

“Your aura?” Michael snorts and reaches for the doughnuts. In about three seconds, the guy at the cash register is (mostly) out of their minds.

\--

They don’t leave until they’ve eaten all of the doughnuts (“God damn it, Gavin, you ate the last one!”) and by then the lunch rush has also passed. The building’s less crowded and the guy at the cash register is wandering around wiping down tables. He keeps sending them nervous glances, so they leave quietly.

They’re a few streets away, getting out of the crowded market and farther into the quieter roads. A few more streets and they’ll find their motel/home squashed between an insurance office and a publishing company. It’s kind of ironic, actually. They’re joking about why they should or shouldn’t have saved a few doughnuts for the guys back at the motel when somebody calls from behind them. It’s the kid from the cash register.

“Can I just – just talk for a second,” the kid stops near them to catch his breath. He’s thin and gangly, but obviously out of shape. He leans forward with his hands on his knees for a few seconds.

“You okay kid?” Michael asks.

“Yeah, yeah, I, uh…” the boy stands straight again. “I just wanted to, uh – apologize for earlier. I’m sorry if I kind of… made you feel weird. I didn’t mean to.”

“Well, no harm done, right?” Ray shrugged. “We were actually thinking at one point to save some for our friends.”

“So there  _is_  more of you?” the kid asks, then slaps a hand over his mouth and looks at his shoes. “I’m – really, really sorry. I don’t mean to…”

Michael quickly glances around the area – there isn’t anyone around them who could hear them speaking. “Look, just be quiet about it. Can you… I don’t know, ‘sense’ us here?”

“Can you sense our aura?” Gavin asks before Michael jabs his side with his elbow.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” the boy answers, scratching the back of his head sheepishly. “I just… if I get close enough to someone-”

“Why don’t we go somewhere else and talk?” Ray interrupts. “I don’t know about you, but we’re not all exactly comfortable with discussing this in the middle of the sidewalk.”

“Oh – uh, right!” the boy nods quickly. “I know a place – people hardly go there, so it’s where I hide when things get tight.”

“Don’t we know the feeling,” Ray mutters. “Okay, lead the way.”

\--

The kid’s name is Eric. He leads them back the way they came and then turns in the opposite direction of the coffee shop. The buildings around them are farther and farther apart until there’s almost none in sight except for a gas station. They follow Eric to the gas station and with some effort he pulls the rusty door of the building open.

“The place is abandoned,” he explains. “Nobody comes here for business anymore, so whenever I just want away from the town, I come here.”

Nearly every surface is dusty and dirty; brownish light filters through the unwashed windows and everything makes loud creaky sounds when moved. There are racks left unevenly over the floor and each one is empty and covered in cobwebs. However, there’s a corner in the back that’s obviously been cleaned out recently and Ray’s willing to bet that the back room isn’t so bad either.

“Nice,” he commented. “Quiet, out of the way.”

Ray watches Eric closely – the kid is still nervous and jumps every time Gavin moves something. It could be owing to the fact that he’s probably never been in the company of three other mutants like this, but something in the back of his mind says it’s not.

“So… your power? Whatever you want to call it?”

Eric wipes dust off a spot on the counter and lifts himself up. “I guess you could say it’s like I can sense other… people like us. It’s hard to explain; it’s almost like a tugging feeling in my chest that just gets worse the closer I get. I don’t know how many of you guys are here, but I can still feel it…” he waves his arm in what is probably the direction of the hotel. “Somewhere over there. Like, I can feel you guys here, but over there, too…”

“That’s really weird,” Michael says, leaning against one end of the counter. “You explained that about as well as Gavin could, and he’s shit at explaining. You just feel it tugging you and once you find where it’s tugging, your brain goes ‘hey, that’s a mutant?’”

Eric nibbles at his lip for a few seconds. “Yeah, pretty much.”

Michael stares at him quietly, and then says, “I have to admit, that’s kind of a shitty power.”

“But other than us and the others,” Ray piped up. “Can you feel anything else? Anybody, anything?”

“Um… No. Just… just you guys.”

Michael seems to notice that Ray’s uneasy. He leans over and whispers to him, “What’s up?”

Ray shrugs. “No idea.”

They both watch as Eric and Gavin chat; Gavin’s trying to explain how he can slow things down, but, as usual, he’s doing a crappy job at it. When Eric asks what Michael can do, Gavin butchers his explanation so badly that Michael steps in loudly. Ray continues watching them. Eric keeps glancing out the dirty windows.

Something tells Ray there’s a possibility that he won’t be able to get their groceries back to the motel.

“Eric, are you the only other one here?” Ray raises his voice over Michael and Gavin. “Are you the only other mutant in this town?”

Eric nods slowly. “Yeah. Why?”

“Just wondering. You said that you came here when things got tight; there aren’t any other mutants here and your power is sensing them… Just wondering what else makes you come here.”

Eric swallows and Michael apparently catches on. He tries to distance himself from Eric but accidentally steps on Gavin’s foot. Gavin stumbles back into one of the empty racks. The racks make sound as they crash together on their way to the floor, but by the time Gavin straightens himself out the racks are still falling.

“Crap,” Gavin holds his hands out like he’s trying to stop the racks from falling without touching them. Eric’s eyes are as wide as plates. “Stop – er, go faster!”

“I think we should go,” Ray murmurs to Michael. He grabs their bags, but freezes when he catches a glimpse outside. There are cars on the road outside and everyone else stops dead when red and blue lights flash around the room. Michael is the first to move when the sound of cars doors reaches them.

“You called the cops on us?” he shouts, immediately furious. There are no lights or electronics on to go wild, but they can hear clicking and buzzing sound from the old equipment around them. “You’re working with them, aren’t you?”

“It’s better than being killed!” Eric exclaims, sliding off the counter and edging toward the door. Michael tackles him to the floor. “Get off me!”

“Call them off!”

“No – I can’t!”

Ray crouches in front of the window, catching the scene outside. There are six cop cars parked around the front of the building, twice as many uniforms. “Son of a bitch,” he groans. Maybe Michael hadn’t just chosen the guy at random to make fun of.

Most of the cops are standing next to their vehicles, guns pointed at the gas station. A couple slowly approach, and one orders them to come out with their hands over their heads.

“To hell with that,” Michael growls, not letting up on Eric. “No way are we getting carted off the fucking Area 51. Is that why there’re no other mutants around here? They tell you to go somewhere and you sniff ‘em out so the government can get them?”

Eric struggles, but he’s no match for Michael. “You would, too!”.

“Hell no I wouldn’t!”

“If it’s between getting killed or locked up, hell yes you wo-”

The kid’s cut off as the bulbs above them flicker to life and then shatter. Gavin ducks for cover but Michael doesn’t even notice.

“Guys, they’re going to call reinforcements if we don’t get out of here soon,” Ray says, groceries forgotten. It doesn’t look like the cops are going to try and bust inside, not with four mutants inside – well, three mutants and some backstabbing asshole. And Michael’s the only one at the moment with a relatively dangerous power.

Just as the thought passes through his mind, the window panes suddenly crack. Ray backs away from them as soon as he can. There’s a few seconds of dead silence before Eric starts screaming and Michael recoils, clutching his head. Then one of the cops fires their gun and the cracked window breaks completely. In the sudden confusion Eric escapes, scrambling for the door. He sprints toward the road shrieking, “Jesus Christ, just shoot them!”

Michael pushes himself to his feet with what looks like the most painful headache in the world and curses loudly. “What the hell do we do?”

Neither Ray nor Gavin has time to answer – more glass shatters and they all throw themselves to the floor as more shots are fired into the station. The next few seconds are weird; Ray expects the sounds of more glass hitting the ground, bullets whizzing by his ear. What he hears instead is something like a deep groan amidst a high pitched ringing. Carefully, he looks over his shoulder.

The deep groan he’s hearing is probably one of the cops outside shouting something to the rest of his squad. The high pitched sound might be the glass falling in slow motion. Everything but Gavin, Michael and Ray are moving in very, very slow motion. Michael manages to summon a laugh.

“God damn, Gavin,” he says, picking himself up again. Gavin stands from behind the counter slowly, almost like he’s in pain.

“I don’t know how long they’ll stay like that,” he says shakily. “I’ve never done it this big before…”

“At least we have more time,” Ray says as they all step outside. By the road, Eric looks terrified. “Think we could shoot out their tires before we go?”

“I’ll take my chances,” Michael answers, already heading out to pry the gun out of the closest officer’s hand. “Knock out that kid while I’m at it, and then run like hell.”


	3. No Better Ideas

They almost scare Geoff out of his seat when they come bursting into the motel, gasping for breath and nearly tripping over each other in their hurry to get in the door.

“I thought you went shopping,” Geoff says when he stands up. He frowns when he sees the expressions on their faces and there’s dread in his voice. “What happened?”

“There’s another mutant here,” Michael gasps, leaning on the wall. “He can sense others – working for the government-”

Geoff gets the gist of it. “You guys got caught?”

“Didn’t know,” Ray shakes his head. “He led us right into a trap. They were about to shoot us down – Gavin saved our asses.”

“Damn near stopped time altogether,” Michael added. “Geoff, we gotta go. Like, now. That kid knows we’re here and those cops probably aren’t moving too slow anymore.”

For all that Geoff resembles a drunken hobo at the moment, he moves quickly, turning round immediately and paging Jack before practically leaping out the door to bang on everyone else’s doors. Ray, Michael and Gavin follow him out to get their things from their own rooms in a flurry of action. Geoff and Jack are running around, grabbing everything they can and packing it up, making sure nobody’s fucking around. They don’t have time for that.

They have three cars – Geoff, Jack and Michael are usually the ones driving. There’s the five of them and then seven others. Not as crammed as it used to be when they came to the motel, but with all of their different powers it would be chaos without Geoff and Jack working to keep things controlled.

They managed to stay in this town for six months, Ray muses as people are throwing their things into the cars. They’ve definitely left some things behind, but that’s always unavoidable when it comes time to move, and they were here much longer than they normally stay anywhere else.

Way too long.

“I wish we could have stayed a bit more,” Gavin says quietly, watching the road behind them as they leave.

“Wishes like that aren’t ever going to come true for people like us,” Michael replies bitterly.

-

At the very least it was only the three of them that had been seen. They could have led Eric back to the motel and given everyone else away, but they didn’t, and they all got away (or they hope they have).

They separated after they left the motel and met up again a couple hours later on some track off the highway. There, Jack pulled out their beat up map and they quickly decided which way to go. Now they’re driving to some out-of-the-way town north of Hugo, Oklahoma.

This is how it always goes – they drive separately so they aren’t all together if they get caught, and then meet up at whatever place looks good. They lose a couple people in the process, drop them off half way there, but they pick up someone else eventually. And somehow they always manage to squeeze themselves into three cars.

-

Sometimes people wonder why Michael gets to drive if he has the potential to kill the car just by getting angry. And just to prove to them that he isn’t constantly raging, Michael always explains it to them himself.

Driving actually calms him down (usually). He has something to concentrate on besides whether or not he’ll get killed next week. He’s got to keep his eyes on the road, hands on the wheel. If the guys in the back get too annoying, he can drown them out by focusing on the sound of the engine. If the reporter on the radio pisses him off, he can easily turn it off and keep looking for the next turning.

They’re running away, and when he’s driving, they’re relying on him to get them somewhere safe. Michael thinks about that the most – he won’t kill the car, because in the end, he wants nothing more than to get everyone, himself included, somewhere safe and alive.

The car is quiet now for the most part. Gavin is snoring in the passenger seat, so is the woman in the backseat. She’s got a teenager and a younger child leaning against her, shifting from time to time, and the engine is a constant drone over all of them. It feels kind of strange – driving in the middle of the night with Gavin next to him and three people he hardly knows behind him.

He knows the woman’s name is Sarah, and he knows that she’s something of a plant whisperer. The boy next to her is Clyde and he has an ice touch, can make anything freeze in an instant, and Anna is the little girl next to him who can turn herself invisible. Michael doesn’t think that their powers are particularly dangerous, but they never know – it doesn’t take too much to make things go haywire.

He also knows that Sarah likes bacon, Clyde isn’t gay, Anna really likes to play hide-and-seek, and… That’s it. And he’s supposed to make sure they’re okay.

It’s dark outside, maybe a few minutes after one in the morning, and Michael’s starting to get pretty tired, but there’s nowhere to pull over. Even if there is, he probably wouldn’t see it. Everything beyond the headlights is just a shape shrouded in darkness. He’s used to driving in the middle of the night, though, and he knows that he’s not about to fall asleep at the wheel, but it’d still be nice if Gavin knew how to drive properly.

Geoff taught Gavin the basics, and in the time they’ve been travelling Gavin has picked up enough to drive in a more or less convincing manner; he even knows how to hot wire a car if he needs to. However, Michael will never let him stay in the driver’s seat at night until he learns to not hit the curb with every goddamn turn he makes.

He could switch out with Sarah; she’s the only other adult in the car and she probably knows how to drive, but he doesn’t want to do that just yet, even though his eyes are itching for sleep. And hell if he’s giving the wheel to some teenager. A few years ago, maybe. Now? No fucking way.

An hour or two, maybe until they reach a gas station or some truck stop, then he’ll get some shut eye.

-

It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning before Michael pulls over at a gas station. Nobody bothers them, so they must look like a pretty convincing image of a tired family on a road trip. ( _“I think we could pull it off,” Gavin mutters groggily._ ) They switch around in the morning when the sun’s actually up; Sarah takes the wheel and Michael kicks Gavin out of the passenger seat and falls asleep. This is sort of habitual, too. Gavin wants to drive sometimes, but he’s generally more useful in the back keeping the kids entertained with his accent and weird stories, like a crazy uncle. Maybe they could pull off the family road trip thing; Geoff’s done it a couple times now anyway.

According to Gavin, the car’s still pretty quiet for most of the day.

“Kid’s always worried,” he tells Michael. “She wants to know when we’ll see ‘Uncle Geoff’ again, or if her friend’s okay.”

Stuff like that always dampens Michael’s mood. Anna is a little kid; she should hardly understand why they’re even driving around so much, let alone worry about it like they do.

“It’s not like we’re on a quest to kill a dragon,” Gavin says when Michael mentions it. “It’d be pretty hard to pull that one off.”

And goddamn, Michael hates the expression on his face. It’s rare since Gavin spends so much of his time being an idiot, but it’s so unlike him that every time Michael catches it, he can’t help but think about how much shit they’re in.

It’s acceptance, and not the good kind, either. They all know it’s a possibility, but it’s like Gavin knows it’s inevitable that they’ll get caught in a situation they won’t be able to get out of, some cell or a box six feet under, and whenever that happens he won’t fight it. It hurts a bit, because Michael knows Gavin will never say any of that out loud.

===

Geoff is pretty sure that if he looks up “insomniac” in the dictionary he’ll see Ray’s name, but the chances that they have a dictionary on them are about -30%. As far as he can tell, Ray catches a couple hours here and there, but from sundown to sunup he’s wide awake.

“I don’t get a bunch of horrible nightmares or anything,” Ray said once, right out of the blue. Maybe he was reading their minds, because they were all thinking about it. “Just in case you were wondering. I just… feel like I have to stay awake for something, and it won’t let me fall asleep.”

With the life they live, it’s a plausible explanation, but even though Geoff isn’t exactly winning the “#1 Dad Award” right now, he still recognizes a nightmare when he sees it. Ray will wake up sometimes and run his fingers over the scar on his forearm as if it’s still an open wound, then he’ll take a few minutes more than necessary to map out his surroundings.

Geoff isn’t sure how to approach it, Ray isn’t seven years old. He knows how to use his brain, though. If he thinks he can handle it, he will, and if he thinks he needs help, he’ll get it (or at least, Geoff hopes he will). In the meantime, he’ll brush his fingers over his hairline, like he’s just brushing his bangs away instead of tracing the thin, light pink line there.

-

It takes them almost two days to get where they’re going because none of them want to take any of the main roads. Well, some of them do, but Geoff’s driving, and if he doesn’t want to get on the highways then he won’t. It’s easier to throw people off if you take sixteen different back roads and drive in a circle or two; they won’t suspect that you’ve only actually gone less than a day’s travel from the motel.

He meets up with Jack first. The town they chose is bigger than the last, but it’s old and surrounded by a lot of farmland. There’s got to be an abandoned building  _somewhere_. The first thing they do when they meet up is send Jack into town to get a look at the newspapers, and the rest of them sit down on the side of the road and watch for the rest of their group.

Their third car arrives at the same time that Jack returns with multiple newspapers.

“They have pictures of you three,” Jack says as soon as Michael gets out of the car. He opens one of the newspapers and holds it up for them to see. “Sketches, actually, but they’re still your faces.”

“Let me see that,” Michael snatches the paper and starts skimming the article. Gavin reads it over his shoulder with a blank expression. “So what now? We can’t go into town or else we’ll be recognized?”

“What if we go really far away?” Gavin suggests.

“The government probably has some data base where they keep information about people with powers,” Ray says flatly. “We’re in there for good.”

“Dude, you were probably already in there, but people weren’t recognizing you,” Michael points out. It’s true; it’d be silly to think that the government wouldn’t be keeping track of every mutant they find, but the rest of the citizens might not have access to the information.

“If that’s the case, they don’t know the rest of us,” Geoff says, running a hand through his hair. “Me and a couple other guys could go and have a look, find a place that looks good.”

“And then stuff us in the trunk and smuggle us in?” Michael asks with a hint of a smirk. Geoff nods.

“Pretty much. People probably already saw you guys on TV or something, and you’re in the newspapers, so anybody that’s looked at them with recognize you if you go driving by. But we could just throw a blanket over you and squish you in the backseat.”

It’s not one of their best plans (one of their worst, actually) but nobody else can really come up with a better one. They’re just a group of civilians who lived completely normal lives (aside from the powers, of course) before governments around the world decided that there’d been one too many “accidents”, and suddenly they were all labelled as mutants and people wanted to kill them. They were surprisingly lucky up until now; none of them had actually gotten caught before they had to move.

It’s getting pretty late in the afternoon by the time they get the specifics of their plan down. They back track a little bit and park on the side of the road where it’s unlikely that too many people will come across them. Then Geoff takes one of the cars to check out the town. He decides to take Sarah and the kid named Anna, the two who’d been riding with Michael and Gavin. Anna looks a little like him, so the three of them play along as a family on their way to see their very, very old grandmother who lives about three states away.

-

It’s a nice town. Well, Geoff says that about most places, because anywhere is nice when you’re homeless. They drive around for a bit, taking a look around before they take their next step, which happens to be a diner.

It’s smooth sailing so far. Their waitress looks a little tired, but she doesn’t seem to suspect at all that they’re not actually a family going to see their very, very old grandmother who lives three states away. She just seems to think Anna is one of the cutest things in the world and she agrees that long road trips can be very tiring. They go through the motions –  _“Hi, my name is Alice and I’ll be your waitress…” “…and this is our daughter, Lily…” “…looking for a place to stay for tonight before…” “…a very long trip, yes…”_  – and by the time they leave, they have a lot of leftovers and directions to a motel.

It’ll probably be cramped, but they’ll need a couple days before they can find an actual place to live.

“Is this a good idea?” Sarah asks him as they’re driving back to their rendezvous point. “We haven’t gone very far away…”

“But people will  _think_  we’ve gone far away.”

“If it would be that easy to double cross whatever agents they sent after us, don’t you think they’d have thought about that?”

Geoff lets out a short sigh and glances in the rear view mirror. There’s nobody behind them, but he always checks nonetheless. At some point there could be. “We won’t be here for long. We can’t just get on the road and expect there to be something for us when we stop. Maybe you’re right; maybe we’ll have to get out tomorrow, but we don’t know that right now.”

“Then why are you risking it?” Sarah’s giving him a tight expression, lips pressed in a thin line. She’d probably be having an easier time getting her point across if Geoff’s power wasn’t interfering with her own emotions. She leans back, shoulders slumped against the seat. Anna’s sitting in the backseat, picking bits and pieces out of the leftovers, showing no signs that she’s listening. She probably is.

“What else do you want us to do?”

Sarah doesn’t reply.

Nobody else ever has any better ideas. 


	4. Looms

Antlers is even smaller than Hugo, but it has three motels in its limits. They split their people up between them after they determine just how exactly they're all going to get into one place, and then they hold their breaths and pray that nobody makes any connections between the motel security tapes when a family checks into each of them. They also hope that nobody notices each of them take a bundle of blankets shaped vaguely like a curled up human from the car trunk.

Michael spends the first night with Geoff and his pretend family of Sarah and Anna. In the morning, they pretend to check out and then switch over to stay with Jack. Two days after that, they all relax the slightest bit when they're all together again and Jack reports finding a few empty apartments to look at farther east. They're not going to stay long here thanks to Geoff's story, but hopefully the police sweep will have already finished by the time they get to Atoka.

For now, though, they'll rest up for a day or two and figure out what to do in the meantime. Geoff fetches food from the little Mexican place next door for dinner, and then they cram themselves in the motel room kitchenette and dining room to talk it over.

“We don't have that much of a choice,” Jack says. “There aren't any available places here right now and if we stick around too long, we'll be suspicious.”

“Isn't there going to be a second sweep soon, too?” Clyde questions. He's got Dani, the girl who can cancel gravity, attached to his back, and she's casting nervous looks around the room.

“Yeah,” Ray nods. “If we haul ass tomorrow or the days after, we can get out before they start and get into town again after they finish there.”

“We can't all move at once right now, though, now that we're stuck between sweeps.” Geoff contemplates the beat up map on the counter for a few seconds. “I'll go first, then Jack one or two days after, then Michael.”

“If we're going to stay inside the town, we'll have to forge more documents,” Sarah points out. Michael catches the cranky look she sends Geoff before it slips away. “We might not have the time for that.”

“It's not as if none of us have ever roughed it before,” Michael reminds her. “If we have to, we'll ditch the cars for a bit and camp out. They don't do sweeps outside of cities. That'll get us some time.”

“I'm only worried that-” Sarah begins just before someone bangs on the door outside. She freezes, and so does everyone else. All eyes go to the door, then to each other.

Geoff mutters something under his breath and shoves the map over the layer of ice growing under Clyde's hands. Michael, Ray and Gavin all duck out of sight in one of the bedrooms, and a couple others slip into the other. Michael hears Sarah call, “Just a second!” and he listens closely as Geoff opens the door.

Next to him, Gavin presses his sleeve over his nose and mouth and Ray huddles in the corner behind the door. Michael presses his ear to the wood and tries to hear the conversation, but whatever's being said is much too quiet. He shakes his head then, and Gavin and Ray both relax. There would be shouting if they were in trouble.

“Who's knocking on our door at dinner time?” Gavin asks in a whisper as they flop down on the bed.

Michael shrugs. “Manager checking in? I don't know. Maybe another tenant.”

“That sounded like some pretty desperate knocking,” Ray says after a couple slow breaths. “I think something's up.”

Michael turns his head to look at Ray, but he can only see half his face because of the angles they're laying at. He props himself up on his elbow and asks, “You okay, man?”

Ray nods stiffly. “Yeah, fine.”

Gavin turns onto his side and leans over Ray. “You ever think your power has something to do with foresight?”

Michael shushes him. “Not when there are others here.”

“I don't think they can-”

The door bursts open before Gavin can finish and all three of them jumps off the bed. Michael's ready to bolt before he recognizes Geoff in the doorway. Then he sees the person in his arms, unconscious and bleeding.

“Who's that?” Gavin asks as Geoff enters the room. Jack comes in right behind him with towels in his arms, which he spreads out on the bed.

“I don't know,” Geoff says roughly as he carefully lays the person down on the bed. It's a woman in an oversized black sweater and thin white pants. Her feet are bare and dirty and the red of her hair seems to have spread down her face and all over her hands. “But I think she's got a power and she's not doing so hot. Michael, get her other sleeve off so I can see where this blood is coming from.”

Michael does as he's told and he and Geoff uncover both of her arms, revealing a white shirt just as thin as the pants. Her left arm is slashed below the elbow and blood is oozing through the makeshift bandage, which looks to be of the same fabric as her clothes. There's no tear in her shirt or pants though. He steps back to make way for Jack, who has pulled out their first aid kit and is passing supplies to Geoff.

“She just came up and collapsed on our welcome mat,” Geoff says as he removes the bandage on her arm and starts cleaning it off. Michael squints at the mark under the blood, but the thin slashes on her arm make it impossible to tell what it is.

“She didn't say anything?”

“She said something was coming, and that's it.” Geoff starts wrapping her arm again. “Get a wet cloth so we can get the rest of the blood off.”

“Something's coming?” Gavin echoes as Jack goes to wet multiple cloths. “Like what? Do we have to go?”

“I don't know, man. 'It's coming,' that's all she said. We're going to have to wait until she wakes up.”

“How long's that going to take, do you think?”

Geoff leans back and considers the unconscious woman. Jack comes back, tossing one of the cloths to Geoff and examines her feet, wipes them down with the cloth in his hand. “It looks like she's been going for a while. There's a couple cuts here,” he pauses to get another roll of bandages, “She's probably going to be out for the night.”

"Where do you think she came from?” Michael asks, more for the sake of asking than the actual answer. “We're in the middle of fucking nowhere, where would she be running from?”

Behind him, Ray makes an odd gargling sound. Michael turns and frowns when he sees the pale grey shade of Ray's skin.

“Ray?” Michael reaches out to put a hand on his shoulder. “What's up?”

Ray purses his lips and crosses his arms. His hand covers the scar on his arm with a grip of death. Michael's throat goes a little dry. Well, shit.

“Do you know her?”

Ray shakes his head, drawing the attention of the rest of their group. He exchanges a quick look with Geoff, a nervous glance for a concerned one, and then says, “No. I know where she came from, though.”

\--

They leave the woman to rest in the bedroom and gather back in the kitchen. Ray sits on the counter and holds his knees up to his chest, balancing precariously on the edge of the surface as he finally lets out the parts of his story that he'd left out before.

The mark on her arm is a bar code, he tells them. A tattoo used by the government to keep track of the mutants in each facility. He doesn't explain what he means by “facility” or say where it is. What he does say is that he's supposed to have that mark, too, but he got out before it was finished. The one line they managed to get on him is under the scar on his arm now. He goes quiet for a long time after that, then picks it up again with, “I think the facility has a mole.”

“Somebody freeing the captured people?” Geoff asks.

Ray nods. “Yeah. That's how I got out. I was – I was – when they were putting the bar on me I starting fighting them off and then I ran. Along came this guy, said 'I'm not going to kill you, I can get you out,' and then he practically walked me out the back while agents ran through the whole building trying to find me. Told me to just fucking run before anybody caught on, and I did. I think that's how she got out, because there's just no way she could have done it otherwise. That place is – it's not just bars and walls there, they have everything under the fucking sun there to keep people in, no matter what their powers are. Inside help's the only way she could have gotten away, and I'm willing to bet it was the same guy, too, there's-”

“Hey, hey,” Geoff holds Ray's shoulders firmly, then puts a hand on his back. “Calm down, man. Breathe for a minute, just breathe.”

Ray presses his forehead to his knees. Michael can see the effort that it's taking to take slower breaths and he doesn't miss how tight Ray's fingers are on his legs. “I'll be fine,” he grinds out. “I'm fine.”

“I know,” Geoff says. “I'm sticking right here, you just breathe.”

“Somebody helped her,” Ray repeats. “Somebody's helping _us_.”

“That's – well, that's good, isn't it?” Geoff asks. He winces then and his hand tightens on Ray's shoulder. “You gotta calm down, Ray.”

“What's he doing?” Gavin asks with a note of anxiousness. They all recognize the expression on Ray's face – a mix of pain and nerves and anger – and Michael can see that it's becoming less of a fit of anxiety and more of a battle for control over his power, which seems to be affecting only Geoff.

“I'm _trying_ ,” Ray says, eyes shut tight. “I don't know how, I don't know-”

“Come here,” Geoff tugs him and Ray goes, letting goes of his knees to slide down to the floor. Michael and Gavin lean over the island counter and everyone else shifts around the room to see what's happening. Their view is mostly blocked by Geoff, though, who's kneeling in front of Ray and moving his hands in a blind pattern along Ray's arms. “Breathe, try to get your mind off whoever that is. Listen to me, I'm right here. Concentrate on me, not him. I don't want to see his face, I want to see yours.”

Michael frowns a little and finds a similar look on Gavin's and Jack's faces. What the hell is Ray doing? Whatever his power is, he's apparently finally getting a hold on it, pulling it back. Geoff's tone changes again, dropping the urgency as he coaxes Ray back to reality.

“That's it, that's it,” he says. “He's not important right now. Look at me – no, you're thinking too hard again – yeah, that's more like it.”

A few more minutes pass with Geoff's voice and everyone's breathing making the only sound. Then Ray finally leans back and his head bumps against the cupboard behind him. He stares at the ceiling, which Michael is glad for, or else the only thing he'd see would be the confused and concerned faces of their group all around him.

“Sorry,” Ray sighs. “Sorry about that.”

Geoff shakes his head. “It's happened to everyone, man. Well, not _that_ specifically, but we've all lost control.”

“It's usually harder,” Ray admits. “Er – well, whenever it happened before, it was harder.”

“Probably because you didn't have Geoff sitting next to you,” Jack says. The sound of someone else's voice seems to remind Ray that he and Geoff are not the only people in the room and Jack adds quickly, “Whatever you were doing, Geoff's the only one that felt it.”

“I didn't feel it as much as I saw it,” Geoff corrects. He stands up and help Ray to his feet. “I think I saw the guy that helped him.”

“Saw him?”

Geoff nods, and Ray lets out a short, dry laugh. “On the run for more than a year, still can't figure out what the fuck I can do.”

“I think there's more to it,” Geoff says. “Something more subtle, the same way Jack's got a mess of powers. But look, we just have to... shit, I don't know if something's coming or not, but sitting in the kitchen all night with uneaten food isn't going to do anything for us. I'm hungry and tired. We all gotta rest. Whether or not shit starts tomorrow or not, we have to get ready to go.”

Nobody argues against that. Sarah doesn't even try to bring up whatever she was worried about before. There's a murmur of general agreement from everyone, and then they have a short discussion on what they're all going to do now that they have another person, especially an injured one, to consider. They create a night watch schedule, finish off the food, and then everyone files out to their own rooms.

Michael stays with Geoff, Gavin and Ray and the unconscious woman. Ray takes first watch and Michael sets up a place to sleep on the floor at the end of the bed with the unfamiliar lady while Geoff and Gavin share the other room.

“You all right?” Michael asks when he's settled under a blanket and Ray on a chair.

“It's only happened a few times,” Ray mutters. “And even though I know tension and shit sets people's powers off, I wasn't ready for that part.”

“That part?”

“I think Geoff's right about me having more than one kind of power,” Ray explains. “Because when I... showed him that, projected it, I guess, it felt completely different than what I normally feel. Like how I feel right now isn't the same as that.”

“You also weren't in control,” Michael says lightly, avoiding the topic of what Ray feels right now. Ray's described it once and everyone's convinced – even Ray himself – that the more subtle power of his, whatever it is, is what keeps him up at night. Gavin's voice echoes in Michael's head and he honestly wonders if maybe Ray does have some kind of foresight. He sighs softly and says, “We'll figure it out later. We have time.”

If Ray replies, Michael is asleep before he can hear it and the thought is gone when he wakes up a few hours later to switch places with Ray. He makes himself comfortable on the chair and crosses his legs to prop the book Ray left behind on his knee. The lamp light is dim, but it'll be enough to keep him awake until the radio alarm in Geoff's room wakes him up.

Three hours later, though, it isn't the alarm that wakes Geoff up. It's Ray, who probably hardly even went to sleep in the first place. He jumps up from the floor at the end of the bed and practically flies out of the room to get Geoff at Michael's order, and when they both come in the room, a bleary eyed Gavin in tow, Michael's still trying to get the woman in the bed to loosen up enough to give him her name. Only after Geoff's been in the room for more than a minute does her body relax. She stops staring at them all with a mixed expression of uncertainty and suspicion and she becomes less like a cadaver with sewn lips.

When Geoff asks her if she can give them her name, give them _anything_ , she looks at the bandage on her arm and then each of them in turn. Then she takes a deep breath and says, “My name's Lindsay, and I think I've been looking for you guys before I even got out of the facility.”

“Say again?” Geoff asks, brow furrowing.

“I've been looking for you,” Lindsay repeats, sitting up carefully. Just that motion appears to take a hell of a lot of effort, but she refuses Michael's attempt to lower her back to the pillow. “There's something coming.”

“You said that earlier. What's coming? How did you even know where we are?”

“I saw you,” Lindsay breathes. She smiles a bit and taps her temple. “Saw you for a while. Which means there's a shit storm coming, a break, and I need your help.”

 


End file.
